MAPS Software Development Kit
The MAPS Software Development Kit (SDK) enables clients to integrate the MAPS Policy Model engine into their workflow processes. The SDK allows a developer to build an application with a variety of configuration options:
- The model can be implemented to obtain its input values from the organization’s data store.
- The model can load and store cases using the MAPS database – Access or SQL Server.
- The model can be configured to run in batch mode to process some or all cases in a database.
The SDK defines the same Application Programming Interface (API) used by the desktop version of the model. A developer using the SDK has access to the same functionality that the desktop application is using – the SDK does not grant additional calculation functionality not supported by the desktop.
This implies that a user of the SDK does not have the ability to alter the basic calculation functionality of the model – COI calculation, premium optimization, survivorship development and valuation. Using the SDK, a client might choose to implement a process which only calculated COI rates and projected optimum premiums, but they could not alter the way rates or premiums were calculated. The model thus retains the integrity of its calculations – clients of the SDK can be assured they are getting the same computations that desktop version users are receiving.
The SDK ships with several components:
- A set of C#.Net DLL’s containing the various modules which comprise the system.
- An MS Access and SQL Server database containing the mortality tables used by the system.
- A sample application and Visual Studio project with examples of how to use the binaries.
- An installation package which installs the above items on the developer’s computer.
The binaries which ship with the SDK include several libraries which are key to successful application development:
- The calculation engine which supports the model’s analytic capability.
- The data access layer code for storing and retrieving cases in the database.
- A data abstraction layer tailored to common read/write operations needed by the engine.
- A model controller layer which ties the engine and data layers together in a useful way.
Documentation is provided by detailed comments in the sample application. An organization which is already familiar with the model should have little trouble wiring the MAPS binaries into a workflow process – the desktop version can run the same cases used by the workflow and debugging issues can be quickly found and corrected.